The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota, #3)

by Ada Palmer

The ancient Manichean cult believed the universe was a great war between a force of Good and one of Evil. In such a world there is true right, true wrong, and Evil was not mere imperfection necessitated by our Maker’s Plan but a Maker in itself, which schemes and undoes while the other loves and gives. This Manichean sentiment leaked quickly into other cults, especially those veins of Christianity which imagined the universe as a struggle between God and Satan, instead of a play where God the Author scripts out rebel Lucifer and loyal Michael with equal absoluteness. The Manicheans had vocal enemies, the Platonists, Saint Augustine, many who argued that light is something, shadow its mere absence, so Good is Real but Evil merely a diluted good, like fabric with too many holes to hold. So fierce were the Christian counterarguments that later generations used the Manichean heresy for target practice, re-proving its folly in theology exams to demonstrate their syllogisms. Soon the Manichees became Europe’s stock stupid heresy, something only an idiot would fall for. But then she breaks, the Dawn of Reason with her rosy fingers, and brings us Montaigne, Descartes, and Pierre Bayle. Bayle raised the problem first, the ambidextrous Bayle, as Voltaire called him, forever seeming to write one thing with his right hand and another in a footnote with his left, confounding censors by hiding his arguments in pieces, as prisoners hide their tools. In his dictionary entry on the Maniche...